Timeline
From the resolution nobody funded to the review that has not happened yet. Eighteen years passed between the decision to eradicate smallpox and the last person to catch it. Eight of those eighteen were spent going nowhere.
Eight years is the interesting part of this page. The goal was agreed, the resolution passed, and the work did not happen, because WHO allocated limited funds and voluntary contributions from countries were sparse. [24] A decision without a budget behaved exactly like no decision.
Those first two entries share a year, and that is the point. The strategy that ended smallpox was being improvised in the field by a missionary doctor short of vaccine in the same year the programme built around a different strategy was being stood up. See the forks page.
The last human infections were not caught from the disease circulating in the world. They came from a laboratory, ten months after the last natural case. [14] Any slate about a problem that ends with samples in freezers has to carry this kind of entry, because that is where the last cases come from.
Read the two halves of this page against each other. The disease took eighteen years to corner and has stayed gone for forty-eight. The question of what to do with the last samples of the virus was first answered in 1996 and has been reopened at least five times since. The hard problem turned out to be the easy one, and the easy one has not been closed in three decades.
The Same Story In Space
Where smallpox ended, and where it still is. Four of these five pins are places the virus was never supposed to be by the time it got there.
The route on that map is the argument of this whole slate in one line. It runs from the last person to catch smallpox naturally, to a laboratory that killed someone ten months later [13] [14], to a storage room nobody had opened in decades [12], and ends at the only two addresses where the virus is supposed to be today [8]. The disease stopped moving in 1977. The virus did not.